There is not enough love on here for The Hot Zone, both the book and the show. The book is great and gory, so if you can’t stand blood I wouldn’t read it, and is slightly terrifying. Richard Preston is an amazing author who is well-versed in many areas in science, including astronomy and infectious diseases.
The Hot Zone is all about an Enola outbreak that occurred in the late eighties just outside of Washington, DC, in Reston, Fairfax county Virginia. It’s been widely shoved under the rug, and most people I’ve talked to have never heard of the incident.
So basically, there are four known strains of Philo viruses: Marburg, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, and Ebola Reston. Marburg has a 50% mortality rate, while the Ebolas have a 90% mortality rate. When people hear about the strain of Ebola Reston, they tend to think of it as lesser, because the other two were found deep in the forests of Africa, and this one was found in Virginia. But scientists say that the Reston strain might be the most dangerous because there is strong evidence to support that it is airborne, which makes things so much worse. Other philo viruses only spread through fluids, such as blood or spit.
A fact that the show glosses over is that four people actually did contract Ebola Reston in the outbreak. The strain had massacred the monkeys in a resaerch facility, but didn’t seem to spill over into humans. It did. They survived, but if the strain evolves and figures out how to spill over into humans, we’re screwed. That would mean we’d have an airborne, incurable disease that turns your organs to liquid and makes you bleed out of every orifice on your body. 90% of people, gone.
The book is non-fiction, but written in a style that makes it read like a fuctional story, so it’s enjoyable and never boring. It tells the tale of the high stakes, covert operation the Army undertook to try and isolate the virus before it spilled over into humans. It is ansolutely amazing, and tells more anout events prior to and after the events shown in the show on TV.
The Hot Zone television series is only six episodes (they’re on Amazon and maybe they’ll replay them on National Geographic), and it is truly worth the watch. They dramatize some bits, but it is overall pretty true to what actually happened. The book and show are just different enough that it doesn’t matter what order you enjoy them in. You will be wholly entertained both times.
The Hot Zone is about an Ebola outbreak, but they also discuss AIDS and what a tragedy it was, which is a fresh take for a book written in 1994. It talks about how the government pretty much screwed over the mostly gay and bisexual men it affected, and the show provided for a truly emotional moment dealing with this.
Plus, the show has a great cast including Julianna Margulies, Topher Grace, Liam Cunningham, James D’Arcy and many more talented actors. Go and check it out!